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Monday, October 1, 2012

[Link] Writers are full of shit (and where ideas really come from)

By Jasper Bark

Writers, gentle reader, are SO full of shit it beggars belief!

Considering I’m a writer myself, and knowing the silo loads of shit with which I’m stuffed, it shouldn’t really beggar my belief. But let’s just say, for the benefit of this column, that it does. Let me give you an example of this outrageous and completely unqualified claim.

If, like me, you’re in contact with a lot of writers through twitter and facebook (and if you’re reading this I’m presuming you are, unless you’ve just stopped by because you heard this column contains celebrity fisting anecdotes) then I’m sure you’ve read a tweet or status update like this one:

Just written 4,000 words of my latest novel before breakfast and done 50 laps of my Olympic size swimming pool. Now I’m off to make love to my super model partner – WOOT!

What the writer might not realise, as they type those words, is that the word ‘CUNT’ springs involuntarily to the lips of every other writer who reads them. Not because we’re eaten up with bitterness and jealousy (which we are), but because the claim they make is so intrinsically opposed to the actual experience of writing professionally. A more honest post would read something like:

Just stared desperately at my laptop screen until I wept tears of pure blood, then beat my forehead against my desk for over an hour. Now I’m off to inject smack into my eyeball and lie on the piles of unpaid bills that clog my hallway.

Maybe it’s because this is so much the norm for our careers that, on those rare days when we do manage to be positively productive, we want to share the joy with our writer brothers and sisters. Or maybe it’s because, as stated previously, writers are FULL of shit.

Bad Girls, Good Guys, and Two-Fisted Action

Sean
Taylor is an award-winning writer of stories. He grew up telling lies,
and he got pretty good at it, so now he writes them into full-blown
adventures for comic books, graphic novels, magazines, book anthologies
and novels. He makes stuff up for money, and he writes it down for fun.
He’s a lucky fellow that way.

He’s best known for his work on
the best-selling Gene Simmons Dominatrix comic book series from IDW
Publishing and Simmons Comics Group. He has also written comics for TV
properties such as the top-rated Oxygen Network series The Bad Girls
Club. His other forays into fiction include such realms as steampunk,
pulp, young adult, fantasy, super heroes, sci-fi, and even samurai frogs
on horseback (seriously, don’t laugh). However, his favorite
contribution to the world will be as the writer/editor who invented the
genre and coined the term "Hookerpunk."